2015

"This paper will address current progress and direction for autonomous vehicles, what this could mean for the future of transport and the possible analytical approaches to addressing these impacts."

Flying delivery drones are meeting regulatory roadblocks and some companies are turning to small robots that make deliveries, by travelling on sidewalks, as a safer and more efficient alternative.

Mobile robotics are traditionally designed using complex and expensive hardware, however now there is growing demand for low-cost solutions that are more specific to the given application.

This report discusses the varying benefits of carsharing and why individual vehicle ownership causes problems for cities and has a lesser public benefit than carsharing.

As e-commerce grows, the quantity of packages being delivered to apartment buildings has become overwhelming. Some owners and developers have begun planning for this by increasing the capacity of package rooms and investing in delivery notification services.

A survey of adults in the U.S. found that there are generational differences in travel preferences.

This report examines the issues that will arise due to the arrival of more automated and fully autonomous and studies how authorities might best respond to these issues. It discusses regulatory considerations and policy choices as well as key challenges that may arise.

There has been a shift in car buyer demographics over the past several years. Younger generations that were previously most likely to be car buyers often don’t have the need or financial means to own a car.

A map locating cities that have removed laws requiring minimum parking. The map differentiates between cities that have completely eliminated minimums in at least one area of the city, removed or lowered minimums for certain uses, and cities that are discussing their minimum parking laws.

The city of Tainan, Taiwan has plans to demolish an abandoned mall and transform it into a public park.

San Francisco’s “parklet” trend of transforming parking spots into small public spaces has mixed reviews among residents. Some people think that they are provide spaces for neighborhoods to come together, while some believe they exacerbate gentrification.

“Industrial real estate analysts say that in recent years, an increasing number of massive distribution centers have popped up in response to growing e-commerce.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) was created as a result of state mandates in 2008 to mitigate climate change in the San Francisco Bay Area. This report evaluates the MTC's Climate Initiatives Program, a program with multiple projects designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by transportation.

Unregulated commuter shuttles in San Francisco created safety and congestion issues while loading and unloading passengers. To directly address these problems, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency created the Commuter Shuttle Pilot Program, a program that enabled eligible commuter shuttles to load and unload passengers at curb zones originally intended for Muni buses. This report evaluates the impacts of the 18-month pilot program which began in January 2014.

This document includes the interests of most, if not all, major issues surrounding the impact AVs will have on our communities, government, and environment once they land.

This blog talks about how the autonomous vehicles will change the built environment such as street design, parking infrastructure, public space, etc. It also mentions how different modes can be integrated with the change of built environment.

Although recent studies of Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAVs) have explored the economic costs and environmental impacts of this technology, little is known about how SAVs can change urban forms, especially by reducing the demand for parking. This study estimates the potential impact of SAV system on urban parking demand under different system operation scenarios with the help of an agent-based simulation model. The simulation results indicate that we may be able to eliminate up to 90% of parking demand for clients who adopt the system, at a low market penetration rate of 2%. The results also suggest that different SAV operation strategies and client's preferences may lead to different spatial distribution of urban parking demand.

One of the public policy goals for livable and sustainable communities is to minimize the use of automobiles. This paper focuses on introducing and justifying an important new policy principle. Even when car travel is minimized with smart growth land development policies, transportation demand management, and increased public transit, a significant level of automobile use will remain. As a result, reducing the environmental, economic and safety impacts of those remaining automobiles should be an essential element of a livable, sustainable community. Fortunately, fundamental and disruptive technological advances in new vehicles—automation, connectivity, and electrification as described in this paper are fast emerging to make this new priority feasible.

The "what ifs" are endless at this point. This article leaves us with only the tip of the iceberg of answers that could lead to what will happen as we are faced with major changes in transportation.

The Renewable City Strategy sets the direction for Vancouver to achieve its 100% renewable energy goal. It is not intended to be a detailed roadmap or technology guide, but instead is a foundation for more detailed planning and budgeting. Project and technology support that result from the Renewable City Strategy will be assessed to ensure that the route followed is technically, economically and socially responsible. The Renewable City Strategy proposes a viable route to using 100% renewable energy—it is not the only route to that success.

"The research described in this report shows that even with the greater global warming emissions from manufacturing (largely because of lithium-ion battery manufacturing), a battery-electric vehicle still results in significantly lower global warming emissions over its lifetime than its gasoline counterpart. Other studies on this topic have come to similar conclusions."

"Our City of the Future: Technology and Mobility report is meant to help city leaders understand, imagine and plan for the coming changes in the urban environment that will affect how we all move from one place to another."

The continued use of minimum parking requirements is likely to encourage automobile use at a time when metropolitan areas are actively seeking to manage congestion and increase transit use, biking, and walking. Widely discussed ways to reform parking policies may be less than effective if planners do not consider the remaining incentives to auto use created by the existing parking infrastructure. Planners should encourage the conversion of existing parking facilities to alternative uses.

This info-graph and write-up display the costs that parking spaces incur and how they are bundled into our lives.

"Carsharing exemplifies a growing trend towards service provision displacing ownership of capital goods. We developed a model to quantify the impact of carsharing on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The study took into account different types of households and their trip characteristics. The analysis considers five factors by which carsharing can impact GHG emissions: transportation mode change, fleet vintage, vehicle optimization, more efficient drive trains within each vehicle type, and trip aggregation. Access to carsharing has already been shown to lead some users to relinquish ownership of their personal vehicle. We find that even without a reduction in vehicle-kilometers traveled the change in characteristics of the vehicles used in carsharing fleets can reduce GHGs by more than 30%. Shifting some trips to public transit provides a further 10%–20% reduction in GHGs"

Texas is one of the fastest growing states in the nation, and its growth is expected to continue, supported by diversity in its economy, geography, and population. The challenge of prioritizing limited resources in this environment requires a proactive approach to travel demand management. This project provides guidance for TxDOT in its planning and mobility efforts and in understanding the viability of various alternative mobility programs.This report describes research of best practices and lessons learned from mobility programs. The research describes executive interviews, focus groups, and surveys to obtain details and document perspectives of the varying stakeholder groups. The research produced a guidebook that will aid TxDOT in determining how to best identify and implement alternative mobility programs in a given region as part of its planning and mobility efforts.

This article explores the possible motives for online retailers to open up physical stores.

Bonobos, a popular menswear e-tailer, opened a brick and mortar store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, but you can't actually leave with anything. This article explains how the store works.

In 2013, eyewear e-commerce pioneer Warby Parker opened its first retail store in SoHo with fairly low expectations. In 2015, that store still occasionally had a line out the door on weekends, and Warby Parker had 12 retail locations across the country, with plans to open seven more before the end of the year. This article explores why the online-native eyewear retailer chose to open so many stores in such a short period of time.

In this study, we present exploratory evidence of how “ridesourcing” services (app-based, on-demand ride services like Uber and Lyft) are used in San Francisco. We explore who uses ridesourcing and for what reasons, how the ridesourcing market compares to that of traditional taxis, and how ridesourcing impacts the use of public transit and overall vehicle travel. In spring 2014, 380 completed intercept surveys were collected from three ridesourcing “hot spots” in San Francisco. We compare survey results with matched-pair taxi trip data and results of a previous taxi user survey. We also compare travel times for ridesourcing and taxis with those for public transit.

The focus of this paper is around GHG emissions reduction potentials by electrifying transportation methods around the world.

"WRI’s research provides initial findings regarding the feasibility and impact of carsharing in emerging markets, though many uncertainties remain. Limitations of the study include a light methodology that only scratched the surface of these important issues, and uncertain transferability from Hangzhou and Bangalore. In addition, the relative absence of carsharing (and research on carsharing) in emerging markets limits the extent to which observations can be interpreted and extrapolated. That said, this study provides important early findings on the current industry, barriers, and service features; and suggests significant potential for carsharing in emerging markets. The results could help inform more in-depth research, operational approaches, and public policy."

"This report examines the changes that might result from the large-scale uptake of a shared and self-driving fleet of vehicles in a mid-sized European city. The study explores two different self-driving vehicle concepts, for which we have coined the terms 'TaxiBot' and 'AutoVot'. TaxiBots are self-driving cars that can be shared simultaneously by several passengers. AutoVots pick-up and drop-off single passengers sequentially. We had two premises for this study: First, the urban mobility system upgrade with a fleet of TaxiBots and AutoVots should deliver the same trips as today in terms of origin, destination and timing. Second, it should also replace all car and bus trips. The report looks at impacts on car fleet size, volume of travel and parking requirements over two different time scales: a 24-hour average and for peak hours only."

Through a review of long-range transportation plans and interviews with planners, this article examines how large metropolitan planning organizations are preparing for autonomous vehicles. In just a few years, the prospect of commercially available self-driving cars and trucks has gone from a futurist fantasy to a likely near-term reality. However, uncertainties about the new technology and its relationship to daily investment decisions have kept mention of self-driving cars out of nearly all long-range transportation plans.

This article looks at how "retailers are honing their distribution center strategy to meet current e-commerce demands.

A press briefing on the results of an international study aimed to ascertain consumer perspective for self-driving cars.

The development of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles is accelerating. Here’s how they could affect consumers and companies.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) represent a potentially disruptive yet beneficial change to our transportation system. This new technology has the potential to impact vehicle safety, congestion, and travel behavior. All told, major social AV impacts in the form of crash savings, travel time reduction, fuel efficiency and parking benefits are estimated to approach $2000 to per year per AV, and may eventually approach nearly $4000 when comprehensive crash costs are accounted for. Yet barriers to implementation and mass-market penetration remain. Initial costs will likely be unaffordable. Licensing and testing standards in the U.S. are being developed at the state level, rather than nationally, which may lead to inconsistencies across states. Liability details remain undefined, security concerns linger, and without new privacy standards, a default lack of privacy for personal travel may become the norm. The impacts and interactions with other components of the transportation system, as well as implementation details, remain uncertain. To address these concerns, the federal government should expand research in these areas and create a nationally recognized licensing framework for AVs, determining appropriate standards for liability, security, and data privacy.

We review the history, current developments, projected future trends and environmental impacts of automated vehicles (AVs) and on-demand mobility, and explore potential synergies. Many automobile manufacturers and Google plan to release AVs between 2017 and 2020, with potential benefits including increased safety, more efficient road use, increased driver productivity and energy savings. Combining on-demand mobility and AVs may amplify adoption of both, and further lower energy use and GHG emissions through the use of small, efficient shared AVs.